Digital sensemaking is sensemaking mediated by a digital information infrastructure, such as the Worldwide Web (“Web”). Through the Web, users can access both “traditional” Web sites that post information from diverse sources and interactive Web sites, including moderated Web logs or “blogs,” user forums, and Web sites with voting, which allow users to actively rank new information.
As a digital information repository, the Web continually evolves. New information is posted continuously, often in response to a growing area of new subject matter around which a topical interplay of questions and answers has developed. Despite this continual evolution, information awareness through the Web remains artificially constrained. Mainstream media Web sites generally only cover popular topics, such as news, business, politics, sports, entertainment, and weather, but a host of additional topics exist through other Web sources, which may fall outside the scope of a reader's, or publisher's, core set of interests. These topics range from slightly less popular topics, for instance, technology news, to specialized or obscure topics that are relevant to a comparatively small number of people, such as evening class schedules for a local community college.
The demand for items in many markets follows a “Long Tail” distribution, such as described in C. Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, (Hyperion Press) (2006), the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference. FIG. 1 is a graph showing, by way of example, a hypothetical long tail distribution 10 for digital information. The x-axis represents digital information and the y-axis represents popularity level. Items appearing at the head of the distribution 11, although few in number, enjoy the greatest popularity, such as media stories falling into a small number of popular categories. However, items along the “long tail” 12, which cover niche topics with smaller readerships, outnumber head items 11. Although any single head item 11 enjoys greater popularity than any one of the long tail items 12, the aggregate popularity of a large enough group of long tail items 12 will exceed the popularity of all head items 11 when enough long tail items 12 are included, which implies that a larger overall audience could be reached by focusing on long tail topics, provided the audience can be familiarized and made aware of them. Consumers of information have only a limited amount of time and cannot pay attention to everything. As more topics become available, mainstream topics receive a shrinking fraction of readers' attention. Analogously, prime time television audiences are currently shrinking, as cable and satellite networks improve their programming and increase their viewership. Similarly, musical “hits” today sell fewer copies than sold a decade ago, as more choices and purchasing options become available. The economics and popularity trends from these observations can be succinctly summarized: “if you give people choices, they take them” and “the head of the distribution is shrinking.”
The problem is not only finding new or popular information: the problem is being able to get correct answers to questions about a new subject area, even though the subject area is unfamiliar and the right questions to ask are uncertain or unknown. Regular readers of information available on the Web represent informal communities of individuals sharing a common interest in a core area of subject matter. Through their online interchanges, the subject area is developed and matures. For instance, useful hyperlinks to the best resources for specific concerns are frequently exchanged via online forum postings or memorialized in Web sites dedicated to the subject area. However, newcomers to the subject area are rarely know where to begin or even what to ask, and valuable tidbits of knowledge, like the useful hyperlinks, remain out of reach unless found through focused search or perchance.
Therefore, a need remains in digital sensemaking for enabling a reader to become efficiently oriented to a new subject area and leveraging the efforts of other readers who are already familiar with and instrumental to the subject area.